Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @01:34PM
from the law-and-order-special-climatologists-unit dept.

ananyo writes "The Norfolk Constabulary has closed its investigation into the November 2009 release of private emails between researchers at the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich after failing to identify those responsible. Despite not being able to prosecute any offenders, the police have confirmed that the data breach 'was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU's data files, carried out remotely via the internet.' The investigation has also cleared anyone working at or associated with UEA from involvement in the crime. The hacking resulted in the release of more than 1,000 emails and shook the public's trust in climate science, though independent investigations after the breach cleared the scientists of wrongdoing."

This is of course quite strange. In any decently run nefarious conspiracy, the only way in would be for a ragtag bunch of misfits to engage in ninja-like operations to infiltrate a top-secret high-security building. So clearly, the people running the global warming conspiracy are completely incompetent when it comes to conspiring. They don't even try to hide their facilities or the people working on it, and most of their key communications occur in a public forum. I'm telling ya, they need to talk to the Illuminati on how to properly organize themselves.

Or they just bought a $200 netbook and walked into the building one night. Universities are not exactly high-security facilities...

This is of course quite strange. In any decently run nefarious conspiracy, the only way in would be for a ragtag bunch of misfits to engage in ninja-like operations to infiltrate a top-secret high-security building. So clearly, the people running the global warming conspiracy are completely incompetent when it comes to conspiring. They don't even try to hide their facilities or the people working on it, and most of their key communications occur in a public forum. I'm telling ya, they need to talk to the Illuminati on how to properly organize themselves.

I walked into one once without permission and started taking photos. Eventually security caught me and I was just politely asked to leave and escorted off side.

It was the result of a mix-up due to an English college asking an American webdesign firm to do some work for which they hired an English (And amateur, to save money) photographer. Somewhere in the translation, 'Oxford university college' became 'Oxford university,' a mostly-seperate organisation, and as a result I was dispatched to take photos of t

Despite not being able to prosecute any offenders, the police have confirmed that the data breach 'was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU's data files

Really? So some highly motivated skeptic managed to find a zip file on an illegally accessed remote server, took the time to recognize the contents as being what he/she needed, and further immediately publish the most damning of the contents? They did all this without being noticed? This conclusion and the timeline of how information was revealed suggests there's literally someone out there who is not only capable of such a job (likely wouldn't have been trivial to accomplish), but intimately familiar with Jones', Mann's, Wahls, McIntyre's and other's correspondence and motivations, and clearly paid to spend the time doing this. It suggests some "vast conspiracy" which doesn't very well jive with occams razor.

The likely situation is it was an inside job. Someone who knows Phil Jones knew he was refusing properly formatted FOIA requests, and likely had motivation to out the correspondence and data/algorithms inside an already created ZIP file that Phil made in case he was forced to respond to the FOIA request.

Your response would have been kinder if you'd pointed out that "FOI" is the appropriate term in the UK. And then we could have judged the magnitude of the parent poster's error. (Miniscule would be my opinion.)

It's not an ad hominem to search for a suspect who commits a crime. The complete invalidity of the claims arising from the crime notwithstanding, it is illegal to break into a private network and steal data.

It's not an ad hominem to search for a suspect who commits a crime. The complete invalidity of the claims arising from the crime notwithstanding, it is illegal to break into a private network and steal data.

I'm actually having a bit of trouble getting worked up over it, since the differences between this and Wikileaks is kind of subtle.

Should we cheer leaks and revile hit jobs, when both are illegal and the net effect of both is getting information out to the public? It seems to me that this lies in a sort of moral grey area.

You know, sometimes, in rare circumstances, an ad hominem attack is actually perfectly warranted. But "climategate" was a blatant act of academic intimidation, and personal attacks on the integrity of scientists. The science itself was left untouched.

Not that I like the way that this went down, but we rely on those scientists to provide the facts that make AGW more or less unassailable. If you can show that the scientists are possibly playing fast and loose with the data, AGW might still be a problem, but it is entirely valid to question their motives and try to discover what the real story is.

As I recall, the emails did have relevance to the AGW research, they weren't just unrelated smear attacks on the scientists. These researchers could well be good at research, but if they had been lying to get more funding for themselves, they're bad researchers overall and should not be trusted to give us an unbiased viewpoint to a very contentious debate.

As it stands, this was a tempest in a teapot, but I don't blame anyone for taking it seriously enough to investigate it. If anything, academic integrity can be just as important as any other.

I totally agree that we need to watch "Everyone" to make certain that folks are being honest and forthright, don't have axes to grind, or powerful vested interests that might render their conversations... well, let's just say less than reliable and honest. Of course you have to put everything in context. The vast majority of researchers are just accumulating data, while the CEO of Exxon-Mobil just publicly acknowledged that "Yes, fossil fuel is causing the world to warm up..." [dailykos.com], of course he immediately adde

If you can show that the scientists are possibly playing fast and loose with the data

Big IF. The worst thing these emails show is someone asking what function would best fit his data. That's totally SOP in every branch of the sciences. There is not even the slightest appearance of impropriety to anyone who practices science.

Fair enough. The lack of openness is bad, but not as bad as actual data manipulation. But since there was no data manipulation, the lack of openness is the worst thing that's actually shown by these emails. It would have been more correct for me to say "the worst allegation to emerge from these emails...".

'Mike's nature trick', is arguably a case of data manipulation through omission and obscurity. By cutting data off at an inconvenient point and substituting data obtained from an entirely different methodology to visually obscure on a chart how key data diverges and fails to correspond to what they claim it corresponds to . An honest broker would admit that the data may not necessary represent what they hope it represents. Instead the say the data is perfectly fine up until the point where it was not fine but it is a-okay to hand wave the problem away and make up some untested, unverified excuse why that bit can be ignored.

Professional conduct that certainly falls short of what R.Feynman advocated: " It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it"

Now you could argue this is nit picking and I guess it is. But this is not some inconsequentual field of science. It has global political ramifications as folk are trying to radically deconstruct and reconstruct our global society in order to dodge the CAGW bogeyman. Personally, I would prefer if there were more people of R.Feynman's calibre involved in the discovery and analysis process. The climategate emails reveal that there are not.

No, "Mike's nature trick" refers to a mathematical technique used to plot instrument data along with reconstructed data. It's a trick of the trade. It is explained in Mann's paper [nature.com]. Nothing omitted or obscured.

Does the divergence problem mean we cannot rely on tree-ring growth as a proxy for temperature in the past? Briffa 1998 [gatech.edu] shows that tree-ring width and density show close agreement with temperature back to 1880. To examine earlier periods, one study split a network of tree sites into northern and southern groups (Cook 2004). [columbia.edu] While the northern group showed significant divergence after the 1960s, the southern group was consistent with recent warming trends.

This is a general trend with the divergence problem - trees from high northern latitudes show divergence while low latitude trees show little to no divergence. Before the 1960s, the northern and southern trees tracked each other reasonably well back to the Medieval Warm Period. This suggests the current divergence problem is unique over the past thousand years and restricted to recent decades.

Years and years of trying to undermine AGW, and this is ALL they came up with ??? --> STILL no proof of NOT-AGW, while there's a 1000 times more money at stake for the oil-industry than for the scientists... You can bet the scientists have less budget to 'prove' AGW than the oil industry has been using to delay any CO2-mitigating policies one way or the other. You can bet they tried to blow this story out of proportion.

I would just like to back up what everyone else is saying. They weren't ad hominem, as per the fact that, in theory, the postings addressed an argument. They did so in a factually incorrect way, but that's irrelevant.

"Hide the decline" was an attempt to assisinate the characters [wikipedia.org] of Jones, Mann, the UAE, Nature Journal, and others by implying/claiming they conspired to decive the public for political/financial gain. It's interesting to note that in the subsequent formal investigation(s) the usual suspects such as Peabody Coal took it apon themselves to turn up and "help".

But aside from that if you don't believe personal attacks were used against them in the MSM, then go and read Andrew Bolt's column/blog from the Hera

My personal view is that it is a bit hypocritical to be in favor of diplomatic cable leaks, but against the Hadley CRU leaks.

That's something I regularly see on slashdot, for example it was a good thing that the guantanamo bay documents were leaked, but it's a bad thing that the Hadley CRU emails were leaked. I figure you'd if you want secrets to be open, that should apply to both the things you like and the things you don't like.

I found it to be a bit interesting that a top scientist mentioned he would go so far as to alter the meaning of peer review in his favor. But would he really do it? Probably not. It's already known that this is a hugely debated issue, so naturally some people would have said some dumb things. Hell, I've heard politicians say worse things and still get re-elected. Worthy of a leak? Probably not. It's mostly just a petty partisan squabble.

The GTMO documents pretty much only revealed what we already knew: people were waterboarded, and some were believed to be innocent. However it also could have put people's lives at risk. Worthy of a leak? I'd say no, though most people who wanted the leak were eagerly looking for something to hang Dubya over. Yet again, just another petty partisan squabble.

"That's something I regularly see on slashdot, for example it was a good thing that the guantanamo bay documents were leaked, but it's a bad thing that the Hadley CRU emails were leaked. I figure you'd if you want secrets to be open, that should apply to both the things you like and the things you don't like."

Perhaps its because in the one case there was something wrong, and in the other there wasn't. And then you just know the trolls of the world would start with their ill-informed nonsense

"Perhaps its because in the one case there was something wrong, and in the other there wasn't. And then you just know the trolls of the world would start with their ill-informed nonsense"

There were plenty of things "wrong" here. The fact that they were trying to keep secrets that were legally public information (resisting FOI requests) is definitely very, very wrong. And that wasn't the only wrong thing, but it was probably among the worst.

Because when Wikileaks publishes data, they actually publish data rather than rambling about reptilian shapeshifters hypnotizing Nixon into faking the moon landing. That's why they get taken seriously while whackos do not.

Of course it can be invalidated. It hasn't been, but to say it couldn't be is really classifying it as pseudoscience.

Any of the following would be pretty substantial invalidations(and these are off the top of my head):1. Evidence that the absorption spectra of carbon dioxide are narrower in the near infrared than the nitrogen-oxygen mix our atmosphere currently has.2. A substantial deviation of multiyear temperature deviation aggregates from the proposed theory(preferably actually negative)3. A well dem

Really? This got modded up? Guys, if you're going to bash these scientist, you really should read more than the two or three sentences endlessly re-quoted out of these thousands of messages by the usual right-wing suspects. That's what the actual investigations did, and why they ultimately cleared them of wrongdoing. (If it makes you feel better, they did say they were big meanies.)

I will bash the scientists involved. I have read all the e-mails and was appalled at what I saw.

Blatant attempts to hide data/loose FOAI requests. This in and of it self is a major red flag in my book.A suggestion that they could stack the deck of pier reviewed journals in an attempt to stop publication of dissenting opinions and findings.A suggestion that they could identify who was reviewing there paper for a journal and influence the outcome.Suggestions of using bad data to fill in holes in the existing

"I will bash the scientists involved. I have read all the e-mails and was appalled at what I saw."

Yes, I had them too. I don't claim to have read ALL of them, but I did read a significant portion and all of your allegations are true.

"As to them being "ultimately cleared them of wrongdoing"..."

It rather disgusts me when people say that. It is a gross distortion of the truth. Every one of the 5 completed investigations I am aware of questioned their methods or data, in one way or another. I count the House of Commons, which stated the scientists

"did not violate accepted practices, but those practices have to change."

Except that the NSF has a stake in him being actually right. I'm thinking you are in deep with the funding malice? "We have to make up global warming to get more funding!" Yes?If some Joe Scientist off the street can prove him wrong, why wouldn't it happen? I don't know what stories you follow, but I'd refer you to the 'new form of life that thrives on arsenic' story. The scientific community fell on that poor lady scientist (who wrote the paper) like starving wolves. The NSF could not possibly fund all the

People on the left don't assume that scientists never do anything wrong. We just believe that peer review (sorry, you're a rightwinger so I will provide you with a link [wikipedia.org] so you can find out what it is) is an effective form of weeding out bad science. This is similar to how you believe the free market is effective at weeding out inefficient business. Once those "christian scientists" go through the peer review process (or actually learn what the scientific method is - see null hypothesis [wikipedia.org]), then intelligent

Don't bother... your not talking to someone who even understands why science is superior to superstition. Why "Faith Based" by definition is living on fantasy island. Which isn't to say there are a whole lot of questions science ain't ever gonna answer, and for those eternal questions, Faith is absolutely the right tool. I'm just saying FAITH vs Carbon 14 is a stupid place to go. Y'all have a verse... "None are so blind..." heed it.

>>>..whinge whinge whinge... I'm so put-upon that I must come back here every day...whinge whinge whinge...forced to buy a product we don't want...whinge whinge whinge OMG SKY JEEBUS WE ARE SO OPPRESSED

You talk funny.Of course I will die someday. We all will even if healthcare was completely free. We all die. It's just a matter of time.I have enough money to pay my bills when I visit the doctor or hospital. I don't need insurance except in the extreme cases (like if I get cancer and the cost g

Good for you. How do you like that extra 10 or 20% tacked on to your hospital bill to cover the cost of people showing up at the Emergency Room to get treatment that they can't otherwise pay for? One way or another you're paying whether you like it or not.

I broke my right ankle in a car accident in 2002. It went over $100,000. I don't know what country you live in, but a ride in an ambulance can set you back $4000 and a day in the hospital can cost up around $25,000. You don't need much more than an infected blister today to smoke a $100,000 so fast it'll give you whiplash (the cost of which to medicate, they'll add to your bill.) A frigging TUMS, antacid tablet will cost you $10 if your butt is in a semiprivate bed. A ten hour wait, get's you a 1 minute vis

>>>>>same people who cleared Sandusky of any wrongdoing.>>>>I don't know what you are getting at here. He was cleared in a court of law, was he not?

Wow where have you been hiding? Sandusky was cleared by Penn State University of all wrongdoing, but twelve years later the court of law convicted him of ~40 counts of child molestation. He's in jail for the rest of his life.

Right, because the guys that gave you gravity and cell phones are such lying bastards and the guys burning down the planet and painting the gulf black with spilled oil have such a spotless record of honesty, responsibility and personal integrity. Scuse me, but me thinks you should address the tin foil you're sporting, before pointing at the stuff on other people's heads.

Well, except it's pretty clear that, despite the accusations, the scientists involved did not "falsify data." Again quoting the BBC article [bbc.co.uk]:"Some of the e-mails released appeared to show scientists at CRU and their collaborators in other institutes deviating from accepted academic standards in an attempt to paint an alarmist picture of climate change. However, examination of the broader context by three separate investigations resulted in the scientists being cleared of malpractice."

Most notably, take a look at the graph in the article [bbcimg.co.uk]. The light blue is the Hadley Climate Research Unit data on temperature. The two other graphs show NASA data and NOAA data for the same period, independently generated from different data sets. The dark blue is the Berkeley data-- this was a project funded by some of the climate skeptics [washingtonpost.com] specifically to do an unbiased re-examination. They all show pretty much the same temperature trend [washingtonpost.com]

In science, ability to replicate results is important. The climate results has it.

So, when you are claiming that they "blatantly falsified data," here is the conspiracy theory that you're supporting:1. The Hadley CRU is falsifying data to make a point which (if you're right) know will be shown to be false.2. Three separate investigations in the UK independently conspired to hide the falsification. Yet another investigation, this one in the US, also conspires to hide the falsification.3. Two US agencies-- on a different continent-- come up with pretty much the same temperature graphs, working on different data sets.4. An independent analysis put together specifically to avoid the putative bias the other measurements also comes up with the same result, and5. By an amazing coincidence, the result happens to pretty well fit the predictions of sixteen different climate models made by universities and research institutes on four different continents, many of which are open source (meaning that anybody can search through the code and look for the putative fudge factors), dating back to Manabe and Wetherald's 1967 model, which, as it turns out, agrees quite well with the results.

Or, alternatively: maybe the science is actually right, the scientist actually are not stupid, fraudulent, or deluded (or all of the above), and the climate is warming at pretty much the rate predicted, for the reasons that are well explained by well-known, not-at-all-controversial physics.

Huh, you're right. Here is what Muller said, "If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions."

Muller has never been a "skeptic" or proponent of AGW. He's a real scientist and properly excorated Mann for the fakeness of the hockey stick.

I didn't call Muller a skeptic. What I did say was that the data analysis done by the team he led very closely confirms the data analysis that CRU did, as seen e.g., in this comparison [washingtonpost.com].

Muller was a real skeptic. He had questions about the science but once he ran the numbers himself he was willing to accept that the others were right all along. The problem you have with denegrating Mann's original "Hockey Stick" graph is that there have been a number of studies since then from different researchers that use different sets of proxies that all pretty much agree with it. So if Mann faked the data for his hockey stick graph then he got lucky and got it right.

They didn't falsify data, but they revealed themselves as lousy scientists.

Good scientists welcome opposition, they love it when someone tries to poke holes in their theory, or asks "how do you know?" Good scientists never answer questions by saying, "since we are authorities, we are right." They don't try to keep papers out of journals, because they know they have the data to counter such a paper, which is the proper way to do it.

Global Warming may yet turn out to be a serious problem, but there are so

The part where you said "they revealed themselves as lousy scientists."

"Good scientists welcome opposition, they love it when someone tries to poke holes in their theory"

Yes, good scientists welcome opposition... when it's from people who have a clue, know something about what you've done, and understand the field and make comments with the genuine intent to understand. It's easy to be patient with people who want to learn. It's harder to be patient with people who come saying "you're a fraud, also you're evil, corrupt and stupid, and I'm going to harrass you and make your life as miserable as I can un

They just get a little tired by constant harrassment from people who have already made it extremely clear that they don't have the slightest interest in the science, but have a political agenda that they are going to push regardless.

They were clearly attacking other scientists in their emails.

Ah. So I take it you have not actually read the thousand or so e-mails themselves; just a few of the carefully chosen excerpts.

It's interesting to read the actual emails. Even knowing that the emails that were released were a set carefully chosen to make the CRU look bad, the actual picture you get is a bunch of very harrassed scientists.

Spending a couple of minutes flipping through the files, here is one with Phil Jones replying to a question of how many Freedom of Information requests they have gotten f

"Good scientists try to keep papers out of journals if they think it's bad science. Good scientists don't welcome ignorant criticism or criticism in bad faith. Good scientists would be aware when some nutcase in the energy industry is firing billion dollar bullets at them, and good scientist will fight back."

But that isn't what they did. They made an agreement to try to block legitimate criticisms of their statistical methods by McIntyre and McKittrick, which have since been validated by statisticians.

So they were trying to block legitimate science, from people who knew what the hell they were talking about.

Yeah, you two internet trolls know so much more than the several committees and investigators who looked into this and found that there was no falsification of data and that the data and methods used were reliable and robust.

"... found that there was no falsification of data and that the data and methods used were reliable and robust."

Ummm... not quite. Every investigation so far has questioned certain aspects of their data and methods. They found no wrongdoing, but they did NOT endorse the results as "reliable and robust". On the contrary, as I mentioned, their data and or methods were found to be questionable by all 5 investigations that have been completed so far.

I'm not sure that's all of them. When this first popped up, the UK government said they were going to do a separate investigation of precisely those data and methods, and

Oh I'm sure Paterno and Sandusky are just upstanding guys. Nothing wrong there, I mean it's not like they didn't lie, diddle kids and boys in the locker room, or anything else nafarious. Now move along. And Mann? Move along, NOTHING TO SEE HERE ON ANY OF IT!.

It appears the 90s and 2000s-era Penn State administration covered-up anything that would have a negative impact on their university's reputation. Sandusky diddling boys? Cover it up. Sports players caught raping girls off campus? Cover it up. Students jumping from windows? Cover it up and just call it "an accident". On-campus shooting..... well they couldn't hide that, but they don't talk about it anymore. The 10th anniversary came and went with nary a mention. Mann falsifying data? Cover it up

Its time for a little simple math. Take, I dunno, 50,000 doctors. Remember, in the United States there are a fair site more than 50,000, but this is our sample population. Okay how many of them are criminals? How many couldn't find their way out of their own underware with instructions? How many lied, cheated and stole to get through medical school. Okay out of 50,000, let's be real generous, you have what 4 or 5 dozen real rotten doctors. A discredit to doctors everywhere. Do they in any way discredit medi

The latest report with all the emails between Paterno, the head of sports Curley, the vice-president of security, and the university president shows the top men *actively* chose to cover it up. Twice. 1998 and again in 2001.

As you pointed out with your other comment to me, funny huh? How odd the/. crowd will happily blast oh say religious groups for the same thing. But if it has anything with the hallowed halls of academia...nay, nay. They are hallowed! Thou shalt not speak of it.

What amuses me is how the "skeptics" jumped all over the recent tree ring report from Northern Scandinavia that said the area was probably warmer during the MWP than previously suspected and immediately extrapolate that to cover the whole globe. If it supports them a scientific study is all good, if not then it's venal scientists looking out only for there personal gain.

Definition of an epistemic bubble: criminals hack a computer to troll through personal emails to find a supposed conspiracy in order to disrupt high level diplomatic dialogue on climate change. Despite widespread professional investigations showing nothing untoward in the emails, those in the epistemic bubble continue to believe that there was something nefarious going on, other then the criminal computer hacking, death threats and blatant intimidation of academics.

Meanwhile, those in the epistemic bubble continue to believe that the world is about to start cooling, and/or that there has been no warming in the last 10 years -- a claim tenuously supported by the most blatant cherry-picking of the start and end of trends, and all the while, the natural signs of climate change continue, in accordance with the scientific consensus which emerged officially in a 1979 NAS report.

At what stage to ideologues ever accept new information into their epistemic bubble?

Guys, reading scientists' emails won't be of any use unless you actually have a clue about science. You can break into a library and steal all the books in the name of transparency, but it won't cure your illiteracy.

The closed the investigation because if they went any further they will be stepping on the feet of the group that does their budget...

Lets go conspiracy nuts!1. It was the climate scientists after all, because they wanted to improve their grants. They actually just did a good job at hacking their own systems.2. It was a conspiracy from the Right Wing, to help discredit Climate Change, they alter data to make it seem like #13. It was a conspiracy from the Left Wing, the real data is far more moderate then t

If you look at the BBC article [bbc.co.uk], it specifically states:"Police say the theft was "sophisticated and orchestrated", and that no-one at the university is implicated."

Or, if you read the police report [police.uk];"“However, as a result of our enquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful internet activity to obstruct enquiries. There is

There is no evidence that someone working at the university is responsible, but there is no evidence to implicate anyone on the planet right now. Whoever did this covered their tracks and probably committed the attack from a public location to hide their identity. Maybe it was someone from the university, or someone from the lab, or someone secretly working for Fox news -- we really have no way to tell.

My first guess (before reading the excerpts from the police report) was that someone bought a cheap n

I would be seriously surprised to hear that no one was involved internally in some capacity, despite the report. Most work like this requires some idea of where things are located on the network, and that's often discovered by an insider or via social engineering.

Of course, this is a university, so someone could have just launched a port scan and hit anything that looked like a mail server, but sophisticated operators usually go in with good intelligence about what they are going after. If you want to sta

By impugning the reputation of the University, its students and Professors and wasting vital investigative clock ticks looking close to home while the real perpetrators are off in the Caribbean smoking Cohibas after a job well done. That and giving wing nuts one more reason to suspect the scientists instead of the folks who had serious money riding on fabricating perception.

Still don't buy it, and it doesn't take a conspiracy theory to realize that most journalists and police are clueless about technology. If you can ignore the source for this thorough forensic analysis [wattsupwiththat.com] of the leaked files and the description of the University's email architecture, it seems wildly improbable that "some hacker over the Internet" would have been able to obtain the files in that condition.

Please don't just attack the source - if you think the analysis is flawed, point out where.

I dunno, could be the thousands of sites that have been cracked over the last 20 years (some publicized, most not.) Have you not been reading about the growing hacker war between China and the rest of the world? Someone with DEEP pockets could get to anybody's data if they so wanted. That seems way more likely to me, and the police in question do in fact have a squad who investigates cybercrime. This isn't exactly a South American backwater.

I dunno, could be the thousands of sites that have been cracked over the last 20 years (some publicized, most not.) Have you not been reading about the growing hacker war between China and the rest of the world? Someone with DEEP pockets could get to anybody's data if they so wanted. That seems way more likely to me, and the police in question do in fact have a squad who investigates cybercrime. This isn't exactly a South American backwater.

Please don't just attack the source - if you think the analysis is flawed, point out where.

The analysis isn't "flawed", actually: merely meaningless.

Here's what it says: "Without someone laying out a complete architecture drawing of the email systems, archive system, backup system, data retention policies and operational procedures, we can only guess at how the system was implemented, what options were available, and what options not."

So, basically they said they don't know anything, but they're willing to guess. Uh, yeah, so?

Your deconstruction is wrong, and we do NOT agree. That seemed pretty thorough, but you seemed to latch on to anything the guy said that provided some doubt (sort of like a Denier). Here's a better, more concise one [smalldeadanimals.com], and the analysis I was looking for in the first place.

That's a much better analysis, but all it concludes is that either a hacker got administrative privilege on a server ("So given the assumptions listed above, the hacker would have to have access to the gateway mail server and/or the Administration file server where the emails were archived. This machine would most likely be an Administrative file server. It would not be optimal for an Administrator to clutter up a production server open to the Internet with sensitive archives.") or else some administrator h

Scientists (including climate scientists) welcome criticism as long as it's constructive and scientific in nature. That's how science improves. Too much "criticism" of climate science comes from people who have little scientific knowledge and tries to use long debunked arguments or is political (scientist are in league with the communists/socialists). It wastes scientists time to try and respond to that sort of drivel.

All the proposed "solutions" to AGW basically boil down to "You 1st-world Western Capitalist nations are to blame for all the pollution, give us your wealth and cripple your industries and economies!", all the while completely ignoring most of the world's most populous and polluting nations and regions like China, India, etc, meaning that any reductions in the West will come to exactly diddly in actually having any meaningful effect on climate.

It doesn't really even matter whether AGW theories are correct or not. Until India, China, et al play ball (which they currently have no intentions whatsoever of doing), anything done in the West is simply a foot-gun contest.